Step 1: Creating your Keyword Targeted campaign

Campaign Name and Type

Firstly you want to enter your 'Campaign Name'. Just give the campaign a relevant name that will be moderately easy to remember, for example 'stop cat scratching'.

Then select which search network you'd like to target. 'Networks' are the places that you would like Google to show your advertisement. Within this section you can choose whether you'd prefer your ad to only show up in search results (the 'Search Network'), on AdSense websites ('Display Network'), or both.

More often than not, the standard option is fine, particularly if you're new.

Locations and Languages

The next step is to target the appropriate geographical locations for your advertisement. We recommend starting with New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, UK, USA, Germany, France and Canada.

We highly recommend against doing a 'target all', because not every country is equal in terms of profitability. For example, while it may be possible to get 1000 clicks from India, you will not necessarily get a conversion; differing socioeconomic factors, such as lower disposable income, or lack of access to credit cards, will cause some regions to have a low conversion per visitor ratio. If you really must experiment with some other countries, then we recommend you try Hong Kong, Korea and/or China.

Finally, you need to choose the appropriate language for your advertisement. Unless you actually intend to target speakers of non-English languages, you're probably best to leave this set to English.

Section #4: Bidding and budget

Your budget basically comes down to what you can afford; a good starting budget for new affiliates is $25 to $50 per day - you can always increase the budget later when you start to earn money.

You can let Google choose the best bids for your budget with your ads which will generally be fine for your first campaign.

A word of caution: Google does it's best to optimize your bidding to use your budget to maximum effect; unfortunately, by the same token, this means that they're almost guaranteed to max out your budget each day. You should assume that whatever you set as your budget is the amount that you'll be spending each day.

Step 2: Design your Ad

Section #1: The Ad

This is where you actually design the Ad! You are required to set a title, at least one of the two description lines, the displayed URL and the actual link for your Ad.

Here are some tips for a well-written Google ad:

Always include your main keyword in both the title and description. This is because when someone searches for that keyword phrase, the matching words in your ad will appear in bold, which makes it even easier for people to see the ad's relevancy to what they are looking for.

The display URL can end differently from the real URL as long as the first part of the website address is the same. For example, if the real website address is http://YourCatSite.com, then you're allowed to write the display URL as http://YourCatSite.com/StopCatShedding to indicate relevancy to the user.

Section #2: Choose your keywords

To begin with, a list of 1 to 10 similar keywords and keyword phrases will do fine. We don't recommend that you go over 10 keywords in your first few campaigns.

For ad quality reasons, it's very important that all the keywords within an ad group are very similar. To demonstrate exactly how similar they should be, here is an example list of keywords words for a 'stop cats scratching' keyword group.

Stop cats scratching

Stop cat scratching

Stop cat scratching furniture

Stop cat scratching carpet

Stop cat scratching door

Stop cat scratching sofa

Stop cat scratching rugs

Stop cats from scratching

As you can see the variations are very slight. In fact, if you intended to use the phrase 'stop cat spraying' we would suggest setting up a separate ad group; that's how precisely targeted your keywords need to be.

By the same token, each Ad in an Adgroup can target different keywords; this means you can then supply a custom, specifically targeted landing page for each set of keywords. By having a customized Ad and Landing Page for each set of keywords you can improve both your click-through and conversion rates! Additionally, Google will see your landing page as more relevant, so you'll get a lower minimum cost per click!

Finally: Review your selections and activate your account

Your Ad is now done! If you haven't already, Google will now prompt you to activate your account (by adding your billing information); after that you will be able to view the metrics on your Ad group's performance!

Lesson Summary

In this lesson we looked at how to go about Writing and Placing a Google Ad. In short, the steps are:

Set a campaign name and the networks you wish to target

Set the locations and languages you want to target

Set your bidding type and budget

Design the Ad!

Set the keywords you wish to target

Create your free Affilorama membership

To watch our full-length video lessons, you need to be an Affilorama member. It's free, and just takes a minute to join.